Michael J. Morello

High energy particle physics. CP violation in charm and bottom flavored hadrons.

The body of my research is focused on high energy particle experiments, at the energy frontier, with a keen interest in CP symmetries in the charm and bottom quark systems. I am involved in the the most important measurements of branching ratios and CP-violating asymmetries in the hadronic decays of  D and B mesons, and L0b baryon, with the aim of testing the Standard Model predictions in searching effects of New Physics.  

I am a member of the international LHCb collaboration. LHCb (standing for "Large Hadron Collider beauty") is one of seven particle physics detector experiments collecting data at the Large Hadron Collider accelerator at CERN, where bunches of protons collide at a center-of-mass energy of about 13 TeV. LHCb is a specialized b-physics experiment, that is measuring the parameters of the quark-mixing matrix (Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa, CKM) and the CP violation in the decays of b- and c-hadrons. Such studies allow a widely test of the reliability of the SM and hadronic calculations. It can help to explain the Matter-Antimatter asymmetry of the Universe which is one of the most important open issue in the HEP today. The experiment is located close to Ferney-Voltaire (France)  just over the border from Geneva (Switzerland), and it is currently taking data.

In the past I also have been member of the international CDF collaboration.  The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDFII) experiment studies high energy particle collisions at the Tevatron particle accelerator, where protons and antiprotons collide at a center-of-mass energy of about 2 TeV. The  CDFII detector  was located in Batavia close to Chicago (USA), and  it ended data-taking in September 2011.

I do research in:

• Search of rare processes, never observed, in the bottom and charm sector;

• CP violation in B and D decays, and in the Lambda0b baryon.

• Measurements of Unitarity Triangle parameters with a keen interest in the gamma angle measurement, the least known CKM parameter.

• Oscillations in the B and D neutral mesons system.

I also do research in developing and implementing  specialized processors and new architectures allowing reconstruction, in real-time, of events with hundreds of charged-particle tracks in pixel and silicon strip detectors at 40 MHz, thus suitable for processing HL-LHC events at the full crossing frequency (see RETINA).